Digitizing Photorealistic Humans Inside USC’s Light Stage

We learn how actors are digitized and turned into photorealistic models inside USC ICT’s Light Stage capture system. Paul Debevec and his team at the Graphics Lab are focused on inventing technologies that create the most realistic-looking virtual people, objects, and environments. We were blown away by the capabilities of the light stage!

Shot by Joey Fameli and edited by Adam Isaak
Music by Jinglepunks

Comments (9)

9 thoughts on “Digitizing Photorealistic Humans Inside USC’s Light Stage

  1. Man, it gets super interesting at the 12 min. mark. Being able to capture a real-life lighting scenario, then recreate it with RGB LEDs and use it to accurately re-light a subject, is something that never occurred to me before, but it makes so much sense once you see it done.

  2. When looking at the lighting scenarios on the metallic sphere it hit me that they are basically standing in a low-resolution 360 television that uses extremely color accurate individual LEDs instead of pixels.

  3. My best guess at 15:35, is that it is a lighting setup for normal mapping texture grabs. Whereby a high definition texture is created to be placed onto a 3D mesh. The RBG channels of the texture are used to determine direction of a given pixel.

    If memory serves me correctly; Blue is up, red is left, and green is front. This texture is placed over a lower poly mesh and gives off the illusion of a high-detailed object.

    The normal map is used similarly to a bump map which you may have heard of and calculated depth of a texture. The map is used in conjunction with diffuse (colour information) and specular (reflection information) as well as many other shaders to achieve the final result you see when playing a current gen video game.

  4. This was really cool! On the current film project I’m working on, the director wants to have accurate lighting and depth of field even in the animation stages. As a result we use lighting setups taken on the set to help achieve this. The video was cool in letting me see some more into the process and how that light information can be used!

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